Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that he is launching a probe into alleged glyphosate contamination in food.
Paxton’s office issued Civil Investigative Demands to major food and pesticide companies including PepsiCo and Bayer, which makes the weedkiller Roundup. Glyphosate is the most commercially successful and widely used herbicide of all time.
“If any corporation is using regulatory loopholes to poison our kids with glyphosate, we will find out and we will secure justice,” Paxton said in a statement. “My office is also investigating whether major food companies are complying with Texas law and whether consumers, especially parents, have been misled about the health claims of common food products marketed to their families.”
“No corporation is above the law, and no illegal action will go unpunished,” he continued.
PepsiCo did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
“There were a series of inaccurate and misleading claims made in the statements from the Texas Attorney General’s office around the use and safety of glyphosate-based products,” Bayer told the DCNF in a statement on Wednesday. “We have been working with their office on this inquiry and will continue to provide relevant information to clarify the facts.”
“In the meantime, consumers should have confidence that the food we eat is safe,” Bayer continued. “In order to protect human health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has an extremely rigorous review process which sets tolerances for the maximum limit for pesticide residues – or trace amounts of any pesticide that may remain on harvested crops. These daily exposure limits are set at least 100 times below levels shown to have no negative health effect in safety studies.”
Some studies have shown that “certain food products marketed to children are some of the most glyphosate-contaminated food products” in the U.S., according to Paxton’s office. Other foods are often “marketed as ‘healthy’ when manufacturers know their products are contaminated with dangerously high levels of glyphosate,” according to the news release.
Tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group in 2018 found glyphosate in all samples of popular oat-based cereal and other oat-based food products marketed to children.
Glyphosate has been the subject of various lawsuits and faced scrutiny over concerns it may cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers, according to cancer research organization City of Hope. The International Agency for Research on Cancer previously classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, according to the National Library of Medicine.
In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to bolster the production of glyphosate across the nation, drawing major criticism from some supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
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